I’m excited to invite you to a one-hour experiential class I’ll be teaching next week:
Intro to Qi Gong: Embodied Meditation for Your Nervous System
February 9, 11:00AM PST. (You’ll have access to the replay for 48 hours, so no worries if you can’t make it live.)
We’ll play with gentle flowing movements, connect our awareness, intention, and breath to release tension and support each organ system.
You’ll learn:
• The fundamentals of qi gong as a self-healing and embodied mediation practice
• How to use your breath to release stress and cultivate energy
• Simple self-massage techniques
• Basic energy anatomy from Chinese Medicine
I’ll guide you through a simple qi gong routine that’s a moving meditation and gentle exercise all in one. Plus you’ll have a chance to ask questions.
It’s a chance to reconnect to yourself, to soothe your nervous system, and to build your energetic capacity.
The investment is just $15.
If you’ve ever wanted to study with me, this is a great opportunity, as I very rarely teach live these days.
I think you deserve an hour for yourself next week, don’t you? Hope to see you next week!
Register now.
Good news if you’re among the millions who suffer from anxiety: acupuncture can help. A 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis of 20 randomized controlled trials showed that acupuncture can significantly decrease anxiety — no surprise, since it’s profoundly relaxing for the central nervous system. If you know someone who’s struggling, please encourage them to seek help.
Almost everyone I work with gets a breathing exercise (or several) because breathing is the fastest way to affect the nervous system. When someone is panicking and hyperventilating, the old breathing-into-a-paper-bag trick helps because the person is re-breathing the carbon dioxide-rich air that they’ve just exhaled.
Try this: inhale, and then breathe out all your air and hold your breath on empty. You’ll likely start to feel a little anxious, because the body knows it needs oxygen to breathe. But if we can get used to having higher levels of carbon dioxide circulating in our bodies, it’s easier to stay calm.
To increase your carbon dioxide tolerance –and thus your capacity for calm– try this practice: Inhale through the nose, filling up your low belly and chest. Breathe all the way out through your nose and hold empty as long as you can, up to 30 seconds. Repeat 8 times, once or twice a day.
Back in April, after my friends and family started getting their second vaccine shots and it started to feel safe to travel again, I booked a bunch of little weekends away to connect with friends. (As a recovering Type-A, prioritizing connection and play is a muscle I’m still developing.)
My acupuncture clinic and coaching schedules were already booked solid.
Then I was asked to be part of a very cool project: one that I believed in, and which exceeded the standard of “it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no” that had been keeping me from taking on too much during the darkest days of the pandemic. But where was that time going to come from?
I blocked what little white space was left on my calendar, said no to everything else, and spent whatever open time I had on writing.
Like, every free chunk of time.
Unsurprisingly, my nervous system felt compressed. My sleep suffered. I felt a backlog of undigested experience and emotions accumulating, creating a distance from myself I hadn’t felt in awhile. I felt that all-too familiar sense of my energy depleting.
It was just a tiny taste of the chronic overdoing mode that I used to operate in all time — and I found intolerable. Thankfully, crunch-mode only lasted a few weeks, and since then, I’ve been able to double-down on doing less.
I’m excited that I can finally share The Thing that was worth the push: it’s a new platform called Inaura, designed to connect seekers of mental-emotional-spiritual-energetic wellness with potential guides. I’m one of the founding guides for Chinese Medicine and qi gong, and the thing I was working on was writing the website’s informational segment on qi gong.
Mental-emotional-spiritual health is so needed. There are so many ways to go about achieving it beyond just drugs, or even their natural herbal equivalents. Inaura starts you off with an assessment to see what kind of modalities might be helpful for you depending on how what you’re seeking, how science-oriented or traditional wisdom-oriented you are, whether you’re looking for personalized help, a workshop, a course, or simply information.
To introduce itself to the world, Inaura has invited over 65 of its experts to participate in a really cool
2 ½ day live virtual retreat
It’s called The Power of You, and it’s coming up on the weekend of August 6th-8th (Friday night through Sunday).
Register for free here: https://inaura.com/power-of-you?ref=24
You’ll want to tune in if:
- You’re looking for a deeper truth or understanding of yourself and the world around you.
- You’ve learned about the effects of trauma, and want to address it, but don’t know where to start or what to do.
- You find yourself triggered, reactive, and activated in a constant fight or flight mode without tools or practices to relax, calm down, regulate and unwind.
- You’re looking for healthy communication tools
- You struggle with anxiety, depression, addiction and/or dissatisfaction with life.
- You’re curious about all the different paths to heal and grow and aren’t sure where to begin or find practices that work for you
You’ll hear from experts on Neuroscience, Somatic Therapy, Subtle Energy, Trauma/PTSD, Spirituality, Meditation, Subconscious Beliefs, Attachment Repair, Addiction, Purpose, Psychedelics, Breathwork, and much more.
Oh, and I did I mention that I’m going to be part of the event?!
I’ll be one of the featured experts the Energy Medicine Round table, at 11-12pm Pacific on Sunday, 8/8, and then leading the Qi Gong Experiential Session: Ancient Practice for a Modern World from 12-12:30 PST. You can come for free when you register here: https://inaura.com/power-of-you?ref=24.
Before you roll your eyes at the idea of another online event, know this: everything is live (nothing pre-recorded), and there are no pitches or dumbed-down content– just straight-up information and experiential integration sessions led by world-class experts.
Each night closes with a relaxing, grounding experiential session – breath work, yoga nidra (sleep yoga!), and sound healing. Recordings of each session will be available within a FEW HOURS. So if you miss a session, you don’t have to wait weeks to watch the recording.
Live events of this caliber generally cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to attend – Inaura wants to bring this experience to all who need it, regardless of funds. ✨ Save your virtual seat here: https://inaura.com/power-of-you?ref=24
Hope to see you there!
With love,
Brodie
PS: The moral of the story? It’s OK to tip too far yang if you then let yourself recover with some intentional R+R yin time. Balance doesn’t always mean equal. We go through seasons: it can’t be summer or winter all the time, despite the messages we’re bombarded with.
